By Robin Pomeroy
ROME (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. food agency hit back on Thursday at criticism from the president of his home country Senegal, who has called the organisation "a bottomless pit of money largely spent on its own functioning".
Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation since 1993, said the broadside from President Abdoulaye Wade was politically motivated and factually incorrect.
"The FAO Director-General is currently working on all continents to deal with the global food crisis," the agency said in a statement. "He has no intention of being distracted by a controversy motivated by Senegalese domestic politics with the head of state to whom he owes respect and esteem."
Wade has threatened to sue the FAO, accusing it of deducting 20 percent as running costs from extra funds raised specifically to help Africa cope with rising food prices.
In a speech earlier this month, Wade said the FAO should fold into the smaller International Fund for Agricultural Development, to create a global agriculture support body and should be relocated to Africa.
Diouf once served in a government led by Senegal's Socialist Party whose 40-year rule Wade overturned when he was elected president in 2000.
He issued a four-page response to the criticism, saying the FAO was dealing effectively with the problems of hunger and development. Diouf will host a summit of world leaders to discuss the global food crisis in Rome on June 3-5.
Established in 1945 to provide technical support to help farmers and reduce hunger, the agency has also been criticised in the past by rich nations.
Pressure from the United States led to an external audit of its affairs which concluded it was overly bureaucratic and faced "terminal decline" without modernisation.
Senegal, at the western end of Africa's arid Sahel, south of the Sahara, is among the world's biggest food importers on a per capita basis and one of Africa's leading aid recipients.
Wade has dismissed food aid as a "swindle" and launched a "Great Agricultural Offensive for Food and Abundance" to raise food production.
